Funeral Damage should be a thing. It’s when you technically don’t need to roll because your minimum damage output is enough to put down an enemy.

And you roll anyway. It’s related to the phenomenon that rolling dice is fun. Rolling more dice is therefore more fun. The hypothesis states that more dice you get to roll, the more likely you are to see funeral damage.

Hopefully a term like “funeral damage” is enough to get your up-vote.

But if for some reason it isn’t enough, now you know what the term means; you know that you’ve done it and you’re compelled to go and up-vote the term.

Discussion (6) ¬

I think they satisfy different situations. Generally, I think funeral damage applies to situations where the death of the target is a foregone conclusion — you want to roll dice to satisfy the desire to roll dice.

By comparison, I think overkill applies to a situation where the target’s death is an unknown quantity, and is probably more desirable than the physical act of rolling the dice.

As I sat here thinking about it, it occurred to me that “funeral damage” is possibly applies to New School gaming, where combat is protracted, and the defeat of an enemy is the end of a long process.

So, funeral damage would be like when the Bardbarian tried to use his “shout” to destroy an altar to which many children were bound, and the sonic damage killed me and the children and shattered the pearls of my amulet of Fireballs and we rolled damage for the three subsequent fireballs that went off because “why the hell not”?

Okay, I think I see. Death itself is a foregone conclusion, but you need to know things like will it be an open or closed casket, will there be a small memorial service with the body in abstentia, or will there be no services at all because everyone in a 12 mile radius is vaporized or a zombie slave to Vecna,